A large literature is concerned with measuring economic uncertainty and quantifying its impact on real decisions, such as investment, hiring, and R&D, and ultimately economic growth. The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of timely measures of uncertainty and expected growth across...

This paper presents a new lower bound on the equity premium in terms of a volatility index, SVIX, that can be calculated from index option prices. This bound, which relies only on very weak assumptions, implies that the equity premium is extremely volatile, and that it rose above 20% at the...

We define a sentiment indicator based on option prices, valuation ratios and interest rates. The indicator can be interpreted as a lower bound on the expected growth in fundamentals that a rational investor would have to perceive in order to be happy to hold the market. The lower bound was...